The Swiss National Bank’s Investments in the Fossil Fuel Industry Inflicts Heavy Losses to Switzerland

With a portfolio of 865 billion dollars, the Swiss National Bank (SNB) is amongst the biggest public investors in the world. A new report published today shows that the known portion of the SNB's equity portfolio (95.6 billion dollars, representing 60% of the bank's equity investments) was the source of 48.5 million tons of CO2 in 2017. That’s more than the total emissions attributable to Switzerland in 2016 (48.3 million tons), the last available data.

The report, issued by Artisans de la transition is based on research done by three specialists: ISS-Ethix, 2°Investing initiative and Profundo. It shows that the SNB could tip the scales in favour of the energy transition at no cost. Better still, with a significant benefice. ISS-Ethix has calculated that if the SNB had divested 7.6 billion dollars that are invested into the most carbon-intensive companies and had used this money instead to finance more climate-friendly companies, it would have halved the emissions resulting from its equity portfolio and improved its financial performance by 20 billion dollars over the last three years (between January 1st, 2015 and December 31st, 2017).

More importantly: if the SNB were to adopt a climate policy to invest its money, it would support federal policies to address climate change and poverty instead of undermining them. And this would be ground breaking for the Swiss financial centre, which, like the SNB, so far supports a path leading to a rise of temperature of 4°C to 6°C. Moreover, Switzerland is amongst the countries most at risk from climate change: its average temperature increased by 1,8°C between 1864 and 2016, while the global mean is 0.85°C. The SNB is thus making the situation much worse for the country.